


You Like Your Girls Insane

by squanderbird



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films), Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2010)
Genre: F/M, LET ME LOVE YOU, implication of future major character death, ireeeeene, major spoilers for a game of shadows, purple prose like whoa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-24
Updated: 2012-07-24
Packaged: 2017-11-10 15:48:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/467988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squanderbird/pseuds/squanderbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No simpering assistant to dress her for this, her most important occasion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Like Your Girls Insane

**Author's Note:**

  * For [etiam_quietus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/etiam_quietus/gifts).



It is intensely, exceedingly difficult, deciding what one should wear to one’s pre-funeral dinner. Miss Adler might grouse, was she of the grousing type; but really, gloating was more _a la mode_ , darling, or hadn’t you learnt anything in her company? She tuts half-heartedly instead as ivory-cream hands flit through her wardrobe with schoolmistress efficiency, fingertips dragging against the slide of warm silk. No simpering assistant to dress her for this, her most important occasion – she knows too well the envied malice that lies, preserved and sugared, in a handmaid’s heart, self-made beauty that she is. The secrets of her toilette will remain intact.

Tassels drip onto the delicate underside of her wrist, tickling at slightly, slightly thumping violet mapwork of veins. Her pulse shivers shallow in her throat, struggling beneath fleshy layers like a chained prisoner, manacled to this pretty little mortal coil - Moriarty, the name she dares not even to murmur in an ear, injections of barbarically surgical poison dart, the muffled aftermath of an explosion encased in a tomb.

After all, it is her most very favourite restaurant, fresh breakfast tea with lemon slices and vanilla cream, minaturised sandwiches with chunky vegetable filling – so, as to the question of the bodice, should she plump for the frivolous lavender sateen, or her scarlet-woman one with the noir daredevilry of lacing, European scandalous both? She is not a good woman and will not dress like one, not then, not ever, not yet on the eve of her grave. Leave the sentimental printed cotton to the homebody wives, shrived in the polite suffocation of marriage – mere pawns in society’s great and terrible game. She is no Madonna, and she is no whore, whatever the newsprint rags might glee over. She intends to descend in furs and riches, heaped with crucifixes perhaps, a lady martyr of her time. And yet.

The navy silk is lying on the bed in its own ocean. She stands in frill of sea-foam bloomers, pausing. Her dear Holmes does care for her in this dress, the sharp darkness of the blue against the undulation of curves, accentuating porcelain skin tinged by sea. She looks like a mermaid inside its armour, full red-lipped smirk; the kind that eats sailors alive, bit by bit, kiss by kiss. Sherlock could never resist a sniff of danger. The past tense hits her with maelstrom alacrity. Irene, this is no time for tears. They will ruin your pretty face, and the gentlemen so like that pretty face. He had peeled it away and examined her interior, dissembling her with one sweep of a glance, assessing.

Sherlock, somewhere off sipping formaldehyde with a razor brain, brief searing embrace of trickery, slip of boxing-ring sweat, the joy of beloved enemies reuniting once more for another bout of heart-breaking. Even if she had made the Savoy, it would have fizzled out, their arrangement – when had it become an arrangement, again? He had his own solar system of a mind to sustain him, and he had her photograph to haunt his Baker Street life in her place.

He will not love after this. She is grateful, selfishly grateful, for that. She pins the same little pillbox hat atop replicated ringlets, pausing to ease the trembling of her fingers. Ah, and here she is, tired-eyed in the mirror: the Irene Adler she was when she first met Sherlock Holmes. To die as one is remembered won’t be so bad. 

Eventually, she decides to go without a second layer of frilled petticoats, petting a farewell into the rosy lace.

She imagines hell will burn enough with them.


End file.
